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Unified Vehicle Registration & Renewal Program
eGovernment Auhtority/General Directorate of Traffic
Bahrain

The Problem

Registration of new vehicles and renewal of vehicle registration were completely manual processes. The new vehicle registration process is used by Car Dealers to register new vehicles sold by their dealership. The Car Dealer has to fill General Directorate of Traffic form & attaches required documents (Personal ID, bank letter in case of installments and insurance document),the car dealer agent then submits this form personally to GDT. Once the form is submitted, GDT checks it along with the required documents and enters the approved applications into the system. The Car dealer agent re-visits GDT to pay the fees and receives a receipt in addition to the registration badge, ownership documentation, and plate number.

The registration of new vehicles process was causing the below issues:
•Lengthy manual process that includes unnecessary steps and consists of lots of administration and paperwork and usually was taking more than two days.
•It lacks the required integration between GDT Vehicle Registration department and Contravention department, as GDT requires a free offence record for the owner before they register the new vehicle for him, which was an additional burden for the car dealer to process any unsettled offense with Contravention department.
•It lacks the required integration between GDT and Car Dealers, leading to a manual data entry of the new vehicle specification such as chassis number and motor number, which may lead to data inaccuracy and re-issuance of registration badge and documents.

Moreover, the renewal of vehicle registration process was used by individual vehicle owners to annually renew their vehicle registration through post offices. The owner will start the process by obtaining an insurance policy from one of the insurance companies, and then visit the post office to fell the registration form, pays the required fees, and submit the insurance policy as evidence of vehicle insurance. Then post office will forward all the required documents and fees to GDT. The Registration department will verify the documents and let conservation department to verify the record of offense for the vehicle, if an offence found then the owner will be contacted to visit the contravention department at GDT to settle these offences. Finally, the registration department will send the registration badge and the insurance policy card back to the post office in order to deliver it to the vehicle owner.

The renewal of vehicle registration process was causing the below issues:
•Lacks the required integration between GDT and insurance companies, which was enforcing GDT to request from the vehicle owner to submit the original vehicle insurance policy in order to make sure the vehicle, is covered by valid insurance.
•The data of insurance policy was entered manually, which was leading to some data entry errors
•It lacks the required integration between GDT Vehicle Registration department and Contravention department, as GDT requires a free offence record for the owner before they renew their vehicle registration, which was an additional step for the vehicle owner to process any unsettled offense with Contravention department.

Solution and Key Benefits

 What is the initiative about? (the solution)
A business process reengineering and automation was envisaged to improve the service delivery in terms of efficiency of the General Directorate of Traffic, thereby providing faster services to the Car Dealers and vehicle owners. To achieve this; online registration of new vehicle and online Renewal of vehicle registration eServices were introduced.

Online registration of new vehicle is an eservice designed for the Car Dealers, the eservice automate submitting the new vehicle registration request, and allow the dealers to pay the registration fees online. Then car dealer agent needs to visit GDT to collect vehicle plates, registration badge, and ownership card. In addition, it allows the owners to pay their offence using online payment of traffic contraventions eService.

Online Renewal of vehicle registration eService is available for vehicle’s owners who obliged to renew their annual vehicle registration provided that the vehicle has a valid insurance, and they pay their offence using online payment of traffic contraventions eService. The service automates submitting renewal of vehicle registration, payment of contraventions against the vehicle and renewal fees. In addition, the service reduces the processing time from three weeks to two weeks and vehicle owners are no longer need to visit multiple areas and pay in several locations. Also, online renewal of private vehicle registration provides a web service for the Vehicles’ Insurance Companies, through which insurance policy information is updated directly in GDT.
The introduced eServices facilitates providing statistical reports on the number of received vehicle registration and renewal requests and the online payment, and eliminates data entry and auditing by GDT officers, It eliminates the usage of unnecessary resources (faxes, paper, human), and reduce the process time significantly. In addition, it ensures a complete integration between GDT sections and between GDT, Dealers and Insurance companies as well.
This ensures complete integration between GDT sections and between GDT and Insurance companies.

Actors and Stakeholders

 Who proposed the solution, who implemented it and who were the stakeholders?
The GDT service was one of the key services envisaged as a part of the eGovernment strategy. eGovernment Authority initiated the service solution and implementation with the cooperation of the below stakeholders:
•General Directorate of Traffic (GDT): The Primary owner of the service, providing the business requirements, development support with backend connections, updating of data, issue and dispatch of plates’ numbers, registration & renewal badge and ownership cards etc.
•EGovernment authority (eGA): Design and implement the service. eGA Conduct as-is study, recommend to-be process with appropriate process reengineering, Design and develop the solution, integrating with the GDT and CIO data bases, testing and deploy the solution, undertake training to the users, marketing and awareness of the service to the public.
•Central Informatics Organization (CIO): Responsible of GDT database and eGovernment portal operation
•Bahrain Post: Deliver the new badges to the vehicle owners
•Car Dealers: Consume the New Vehicle Registration service and provide GDT with accurate vehicle specification.
•Insurance companies: Integrate their individual system with GDT through eGA portal to provide insurance policies details
•Vehicle Owner: Consume the Renewal of Vehicle Registration eService

(a) Strategies

 Describe how and when the initiative was implemented by answering these questions
 a.      What were the strategies used to implement the initiative? In no more than 500 words, provide a summary of the main objectives and strategies of the initiative, how they were established and by whom.
The eGovernment Strategy was defined to include services that would help support both citizen & business lifecycles.

A Workforce of various representatives of all stakeholders was established. Initiatives, objectives, and benefits of this service were defined and outlined.

The objective was to have a fully automated solution that will allow Car Dealers to register new vehicles and allow private vehicle owners to renew vehicle registration without the need to wait in queues at GDT counters. This would require seamless integration between the biggest two stakeholders (CIO & GDT) to ensure transference of data between both systems are accurate and done in a timely manner.

Both technical and business teams were set-up to define the requirements, functionality, and any technical limitations to ensure the above objective is attained.

(b) Implementation

 b.      What were the key development and implementation steps and the chronology? No more than 500 words
Key development and implementation steps included the following:
1)As-Is & To-Be process: eGA conducted a study among the various stakeholders – the Car Dealers, citizens, insurance companies, and the GDT employees for understating the existing processes of the related service and also designed the To-Be services. The To-Be process was designed based on process efficiency, change management etc.

2)Service development: eGA has its own methodology for service development (Service Development Life Cycle) based on ITIL and CMMi methodlogies. The various phases of service development include the high level design, low level design; testing, QA and service roll out.

3)Business continuity and operations: eGA and GDT has together tied up and created processes for continued business operation to provide the services 24X7. The eGA contact centre provides the customer support and eGA payment gateway provides the payment facility.

(c) Overcoming Obstacles

 c.      What were the main obstacles encountered? How were they overcome? No more than 500 words
The main obstacles in implementing this solution were as follows:
1)Change management: The services required the ministry to process the services in a new way. This initiated some change management as the staffs were doing part of the processing in the systems. This transition was undertaken through proper training, education and awareness to GDT staff.

2)Building trust and credibility among the user: Traditionally all GDT services required physical presence of the service recipient. Therefore, by enabling the services online, the end users as well as the ministry staff were skeptical on the trust, credibility and confidentiality of the services. These apprehensions were overcome through proper awareness creations and marketing and training session.

3)Security: This service had numerous integrations across different stakeholders which would access sensitive and personal data. We had to ensure that the connections did not pose any threat to the data integrity and that no external connections could breach this secure line. This obstacle was overcome by ensuring that all security standards in place within the Government Data Network were implemented and that all access points were granted based on various permissions such as IP Address, User Accounts and location of use.

(d) Use of Resources

 d.      What resources were used for the initiative and what were its key benefits? In no more than 500 words, specify what were the financial, technical and human resources’ costs associated with this initiative. Describe how resources were mobilized
The GDT services were identified to be implemented as a part of the eGovernment strategy of Bahrain.

Therefore, the resources were appropriately allocated for developing and implementing these services. The various aspects of the resource allocations are as follows:

Human resources: The team consisted of the following dedicated skill sets from eGA and GDT working as a team
•BPR specialist to provide the As-IS and TO-BE
•Business Analyst to provide the service prototype
•Technical Analyst to study the existing system in GDT and advise on the suitable architecture
•Service Manager responsible for end to end project management of the system and in charge of business continuity
•Developer to develop the software systems
•QA and Testing team to ensure end to end quality assessment of the service.

Technical resources: The solution was designed with the existing capabilities (h/w and s/w) available with GDT and eGA. The back end was hosted at GDT and CIO. The front end services were provisioned on the national portal of Bahrain.

Sustainability and Transferability

  Is the initiative sustainable and transferable?
The eGovernment strategy and programme is implementing over 250 eServices in collaboration with various ministries. As this is an ongoing transformation initiative each of the services developed requires a large amount of process reengineering efforts, change management, integration and development of multiple systems.

The GDT Service is one of the well-integrated service connecting multiple organizations and workflows spanning across different ministries. The service is developed based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and uses web services. Therefore, any future changes / integration / scalability in terms of new features could be easily added in the service. This service development therefore acts as an example for such complex and integrated service. eGA can transfer / extend the knowhow developed through this implementation to other complex service developments and also to ministries.

Lessons Learned

 What are the impact of your initiative and the lessons learned?
Today, the services involves all stakeholders in a fully automated service which saves them time, minimizes cost on commuting to-and-from the ministry for customers, and decreases the impact on the environment through reduction of hard copy requirements. The key elements were the seamless integration across various stakeholders and the increased efficiency and turnaround in registering new vehicles and renewing vehicle registration.

Online registration of new vehicle, eliminated unnecessary steps, reduced the processing time from one week to two days, eliminated the usage of unnecessary resources (faxes, paper, human), introduced intelligence for the various calculations and logic required for the process, eliminated dealer’s visits to GDT to submit requests, enabled online payments, provided statistical reports on the number of received vehicle registration and renewal requests and automated the following:
•Registration Form
•generation of registration badge and ownership cards from the system
•registration badge with barcode containing vehicle information
•generation of plates’ numbers

Additionally, Online Renewal of vehicle registration reduced the processing time from reciving the application to deliver the documents by post from three weeks to two weeks, allowed vehicle owners to pay the registration fees online and pay their offence using online payment of traffic contraventions eService.

Contact Information

Institution Name:   eGovernment Auhtority/General Directorate of Traffic
Institution Type:   Government Agency  
Contact Person:   Mohammed Abdulaziz
Title:   Chief, eService Delivery  
Telephone/ Fax:  
Institution's / Project's Website:   www.bahrain.bh
E-mail:   maziz@ega.gov.bh  
Address:  
Postal Code:  
City:   Muharreq
State/Province:  
Country:   Bahrain

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